As we anxiously await Jared Leto’s big screen take on The Joker for Suicide Squad, another Heath Ledger character will get reimagined for an upcoming project. Miramax is heading back to the world of Terry Gilliam’s partially maligned 2005 feature The Brothers Grimm for a new TV series. Someone’s Fairy Godmother is working overtime on this one.
What’s more, the studio tapped the film’s screenwriter Ehren Kruger as the one to get it into development, and he’ll be writing as well as executive producing alongside Daniel Bobker. According to Miramax’s Executive Vice President of Film & TV Zanne Devine, Kruger was contacted to see if he was interested, and his pitch for the series “blew us away.” Something tells me this new take will throw an assortment of classic characters together, in the same vein as Once Upon a Time or even Marvel projects. Everybody needs more Rumplestil…Rumpelstilsk…more Snow White in their lives.
This new version will again focus on brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm as they go from one swashbuckling adventure to the next in 19th century Europe. They will stumble upon the legends and myths that became the beloved fairy tales that readers young and old have been enjoying for hundreds of years.
Here’s how Kruger described the small screen approach.
The original stories the Brothers set out to collect were not for the faint of heart and we’ll be making a show that gets back to those origins and their cautionary, scary, thrilling spirit.
I love it, as I’m a sucker for literary mash-up projects like this, especially if it skews dark. Depending on what network ends up showing the most interest in this show, we could see anything from glossy NBC historical fiction to brooding HBO-budgeted locations. Is this something that Netflix should already be pulling out their wallet for? The movie wasn’t exactly a smashing success, but it also had one of the more problematic productions in modern moviemaking.
For one, Kruger’s screenplay was rewritten in part by Gilliam and Grisoni, but their work on the script went uncredited by the Writers Guild, leaving Kruger as the lone screenwriter. Then Gilliam spent much of the shoot arguing with Bob and Harvey Weinstein over the final cut of the film – no surprise there – and the initial release was pushed back almost a year. Add to that a calamitous post-production with an effects studio that was given more work than it was originally cut out to handle. It was eventually released, earning just $37 million domestically, and it only made its $88 million budget back with international grosses.
This will be Kruger’s second major TV project, though his 2014 pilot Tin Man never made it to series. His film career is a little more extensive, though your mileage may vary. He’s written things like Reindeer Games, The Ring and its terrible sequel, as well as the last three Transformers films.
Will this be as well-received as that other revision of a Terry Gilliam film, 12 Monkeys? I can’t wait to find out.
